Manifesto for Collections-Based Research and Teaching

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Introduction and Assertions

Manifestos are polemical and directive, concerning practices and systems that cry out for radical change.

They derive from consensus garnered widely and over relatively long periods of time, and require in the first instance a definition of their underlying foundations and assumptions.

1) In thinking about academic learning spaces, we need an inclusive definition of “museum”: the term already encompasses a huge range of materials, from natural history to ethnography, industrial and technological instruments, decorative arts, fine art, theatre history, maritime and naval history and so much more.¹ A valuable definition would extend to collections such as archives, libraries and cinematheques containing materials such as photography, cartography, films and architectural draw- ings: such materials are linked historically to those held in museums, but have been divided from them institu- tionally. Researching and learning in museum contexts also means seeking correlative contextual evidence in sister institutions, driven by research questions not limited by these divisions. From this point on, instead of saying “museum” I will use “collection” and “collecting institution” to convey the breadth of this definition.

2) An “academic learning space” is primarily one of research, and of the development and transference of research methods. The learning — and teaching — of research methods takes place at BA and MA level, inten- sifying over this trajectory: the main aim of a PhD project is to demonstrate an ability to choose, deploy and even to Martha Fleming

Manifesto for Collections-

Based Research and Teaching

forge new research methods appropriate to the research questions. Most of this manifesto refers to the PhD level, but elements of this training are applicable to BA and MA contexts as well. My point is that research activity is the most vital constituent of any successful university learning environment, and research environments are not unique to the university. It is a pedagogical position, not an institutional location, and since collecting institutions are crucial to the production of knowledge in many fields, we can find such learning spaces in most collecting institutions as well.

3) Museums, archives and collections are intrinsically research institutions on a par with universities, with a very different and highly complementary structure, infrastructure and modus operandi. A close look at collecting institutions reveals a research culture under- recognised in academia and in research evaluation met- rics: one that is practice-based and entirely legitimate as research commensurate with that of peers working in the academic humanities. This research culture includes acquisitions and appraisal research, as well as provenance research in a range of contexts such as decolonisation, biological species distribution, or looted art. It includes research in information science and digital humanities, action research with communities of origin and enthusi- asts, materials research, contextual research and description for archives, policy framework creation, exhibition innovations, architectural environmental technologies

— an extensive, complex and interlocking set of methods, processes, activities and outcomes.² This practice-based

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research culture of collecting institutions is barely visible qua research to universities, research funders and state agencies — a blind spot that needs to be eradicated if we are to fully realise the potential of collecting institutions as interdisciplinary learning spaces. The very definition of what constitutes “legitimate” research is not agreed or equally rewarded across the institutional boundaries between collecting institutions and universities, and this inherent asymmetry cannot help but influence the crossover space in which the teaching and learning of research methods takes place.

Learning Research Methods in Collections Contexts

How is an academic learning space currently operational- ised across such different infrastructures as the museum and the university? What collaborations, infrastructures and — implicitly — culture change, are required?

Going beyond research that is simply about muse- ums and collecting institutions means doing truly col- laborative research with them and in them — research that integrates their specific practice-based methodologies.

Collections-based research with humanities methods can be loosely characterised as research that takes place in contexts where primary source materials are held in structured frameworks. This can be in museums, but also in archives, personal papers, corporate records and other contexts. Such collections can contain artworks, letters, material culture and instruments, and thus are significant for all kinds of research in all manner of knowledge practices and disciplinary contexts in the wider humanities, social sciences and arts. Learning methods appropriate for research in these contexts is not at all the same thing as learning how to be a museum professional or effecting institutional critique from a safe distance. Collections-based research training is not simply “museum studies lite”: it enables scholars to engage most fully and deeply with collection contexts and their contents, where objects, histories and methods come critically alive to each other.³ Far beyond the “close look- ing” that is enabled when art history classes transfer from

classroom to public gallery, collections-based research takes university research students at any level directly into the engine room of a museum: they need training to see and hear above the roar and blast of the furnace of meaning they will encounter there.

What is expected by universities and their students in the (literal and figurative) academic learning space of collecting institutions such as museums goes something like this:

• Students will have exceptional access to collections and to information held about those collections.

• Students will be able to converse with any and every staff member affiliated with the collecting institution, calling on their knowledge to support the student’s work.

• Collection staff will as a matter of course teach students how to use the collecting institution’s resources and instruments: databases, conservation labs, project management tools, technical services, library, and more.

All of this access comes at a cost that is far too rarely covered in terms of staff time and resources. On the occa- sions when all of the above happens as it should, these collaborative, cross-institutional studentships (often PhDs) are among the most rewarding, sociable, syner- getic, research-rich, interdisciplinary, dynamic, groundbreaking, intensive, upskilling and productive doctoral studentships to be held anywhere in the world. From my own experience of designing such studentships and training such students in the UK, Germany and the United States, those who survive the complexity of such projects come out tempered and galvanised, able to work across differing contexts and to design and deploy synthesised methodologies from widely divergent disciplines. Surely we need them and their skills; surely we need to pay more attention to the health of the wider collaboration that supports this learning space, and to what museums need in order to sustain it.

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Landscapes of Collections-Based Learning Spaces

In their article for Nordisk Museologi covering recent Danish university research on and in museum interpretation projects, Knudsen and Simonsen state “it is beyond the scope of this article to further describe the relation- ships between cultural policy, funding strategies and the shaping of research collaborations between museums and universities.” (Vestergaard Knudsen and Ekelund Simonsen 2017, 88–104). This is the landscape that I will now begin to chart. The academic learning space of collecting institutions is understood, supported and enacted very differently at different institutional scales.

At the micro-scale, individual students and collecting institution staff come into direct (and, ideally, well- prepared) contact with collections in the framework of student-led research questions. A fundamental knowledge-generating excitement is mutually produced;

one that can be favourably compared to the best experimental inquiry in any field. A number of students now working professionally as researchers in both collecting arenas and university contexts have told me unhesi- tatingly that the periods they spent inside collecting institutions as students or placements were the most practically and intellectually enriching experiences of

their entire tertiary education. This is the scale at which pedagogical innovation is most significant — the scale of one-to-one teaching where collection professionals trans- mit their embodied knowledge of the ways in which their areas of expertise in material culture imbricate with the panoply of practices deployed in collecting institutions.⁴ It is often a multi-layered and self-reflexive experience conjoining practice and theory, intrinsically extruding thick descriptions and addressing significant epistemes of knowledge production (Geertz 1973, 3-30).

At institutional scale, the departmental divisions that already internally sunder both collecting institutions and universities into pie-shaped pieces are very problematic for the effective functioning of these bodies. This is mul- tiplied when these constraints apply across partnerships between universities and collecting institutions, as problems begin to ricochet across the two institutions. Many joint projects and partnerships in research and in teaching are hampered by pre-existent processual dysfunctions within the two types of institutions, by misunderstand- ings concerning each other’s purpose and practice, and by being truncated to singular department-to-department agreements that do not embrace the full interdisciplinary potential of the wider inter-institutional exchange.

Dr. Anke Napp (centre), Director of the Mediathek at the Department of Art History, University of Hamburg, giving an informal seminar on the media history of the slide library to a group of German University Museum colleagues, July 2016. Note that the slide library retains the structure created by Erwin Panofsky during his tenure at the University of Hamburg (1920- 1933). Photo: Martha Fleming.

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The very different currencies and economies of these two sorts of knowledge institutions are often submerged and ignored in these partnerships, dooming them to par- tial success and wasted resources, and making all the more miraculous those projects which do succeed. Collecting institutions are often cast at best in a supportive, subju- gated role as “infrastructure” for research — research that is assumed to be best conducted by those who are university-based. This service paradigm does not acknowledge the particular research questions, contexts, and practices of the collecting institution as different from, and complementary to, those of the university. The gradations by which universities identify authoritative competences do not necessarily reflect the ways in which knowledge is generated, valued, and deployed in a museum or collection research context.

At policy, evaluation and funding scale, the research

“outputs and outcomes” valued by universities and research councils are in the main scholarly publica- tions, while those produced and valued in collecting institution contexts are much wider and include every- thing from exhibitions to information architectures and materials analysis. That there is increasing recognition of the exhibition catalogue as a valid scholarly publication is a modest gain, and one limited mainly to the field of art history: even then, the exhibitions themselves are very rarely evaluated as research. Among the problems being encountered by practice-based doctoral students in art history, particularly in curatorial practice, is simply that once the methods of a research degree shift from theory to practice, the scholarly outcomes of the research change as well. Yet it takes much longer than a doctoral cycle for the supervision pedagogy and the evaluation criteria to catch up with these paradigm shifts.⁵

This landscape is the context for our “museum as academic learning space” and there is cause for concern.

These unequal pulls make partnerships unnecessarily difficult and asymmetrical, and they deeply influence the funding, design, operationalisation and experience of collections as academic learning spaces for both students and more seasoned researchers. Improvements can

most productively be made at the policy, evaluation and funding scale, as they will better the conditions for all other scales of research, teaching and learning.

Recommendations

What follows is a draft manifesto for an ideal teaching, learning and research arena yet to be built between universities and collecting institutions — one that is not only desirable but also possible. There are a number of proto-models for this, some of them longstanding, such as the UK Collaborative Doctoral Award studentships.⁶ In Germany, another model is the iterative development of training and policy led by the Coordination Centre for Scientific University Collections (Koordinerungs- stelle für wissenschaftliche Universitätssammlungen in Deutschland, founded 2011). The cost of building on those models and instating the following ideal programme would be comparatively modest and a valuable investment; the result for the wider humanities and the social sciences would be unique and groundbreaking.

Teaching and Learning

At doctoral, magister and undergraduate levels, significant emergent practices of the 21st century require training:

collections-based research is one. As it is inter-institutional, both universities and collecting institutions have a part to play in this training and need to be funded equally in order to do this effectively. This must be budgeted and planned holistically; for universities to unthink- ingly continue to expect in-kind contributions of time, resources and knowledge from collecting institutions in research and teaching contexts is not a sustainable basis for productive partnerships in the long term.

Collections-based research teaching teams work best when composed of interdisciplinary teams of collections professionals and academic researchers with a sound knowledge and experience of collections contexts, histories and structures. Successful teaching teams are led by someone with experience in widely interdisciplinary research practices, direct experience of working in museums, archives or libraries, and appropriate academic

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qualifications. The creation of crossover professorships and departmental chairs in this field is essential, with good models being found at the Bard Graduate Center and the University of Göttingen (Gaskell; Vöhringer).

In the PhD programme that I led from 2013-2016 at the University of Reading, Centre for Collections-Based Research, the teaching of collections-based research methods was delivered alongside all other university methodology training and aimed to provide students with the research skills required to:

• successfully navigate collections-based research environments.

• develop and answer high-quality research questions informed by multiple methodological approaches, including those based in collections.

• identify and critique intellectual and institutional practices and boundaries.

• collaborate effectively with museum and archive professionals as research colleagues.

At Reading — as at the Bard Graduate Center and the University of Göttingen — teaching involves immersion in subject-specific collections-based research environ-

ments, such as storage depots, and close collaboration with scholars who are also collections professionals.

There is a focus on collections research skills, not on collections management skills — however, learning the basics of object handling and care, environmental requirements of collections, conservation and preserva- tion concepts all build the personal confidence of the student and institutional trust.

Training humanities students to understand the structures of collections — physical, organisational, institutional and intellectual — allows them to navigate the inherent meanings and hierarchies. Natural historical materials are organised very differently to artworks or ethnographic and archaeological materials; studying the use and symbolism of pheasant feathers could easily take one to all four distinct kinds of collections. Information structures such as catalogues and their standards, the- sauri, documentation of conservation and digital meta- data are complex and require explanation. Many students initially assume that collections are fixed, intentional entities, when in fact they are organic assemblages with entangled and aleatory histories, the details of which define what can and cannot be researched in and through them. Critical thinking specific to the histories of collec- Ingrid Seyb (centre), Assistant

Conservator of Objects and Sculp- ture, teaching the internal structure of Chromo-kinetik set (1964) by Brazilian artist Abraham Palatnik, as part of the kickoff workshops for “Object-Based Learning in the Museum and University Context”, a research and teaching partnership between the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the Univer- sity of Houston. Photo: Martha Fleming.

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tions and their institutions is itself a set of methods as significant as any other historiographic tool, and it too must be taught to people working in fields such as history of science, human geography and literary studies. This goes hand in hand with learning about ethics and integrity in working with objects, archives, images and data.

Assemblages of objects also require learning the methods of material culture studies in order to be able to parse the differences between manufacture, intention, use and circulation of individual things. Going one step further, collections research training has also recently incorporated “making” as a form of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. For example, reconstruc- tion of varnish recipes is leading to deeper understandings of histories of knowledge production in art history.⁷ Understanding collection objects from multiple disciplinary standpoints, methods and analysis requires the full range of teaching methods, including seminars, tutorials, hands-on laboratories, online learning, field trips, expert visits, and supervision from both faculty and museum and archive professionals. Understanding the actual roles of collecting institution professionals is vital to begin to understand how best to collaborate with them in the wider, deeper and longer projects that will mark research careers as successful.

For this reason, the best training is developed and delivered in tandem with collecting institution staff work- ing in university museums and collections or in wider local clusters of collecting institutions that could partner with university faculties. All too often, this kind of team teaching is an afterthought. It should be fully planned in advance, costed and paid for, including the collecting institution staff time, resources and overheads, just as it would be in a faculty context.⁸

Further upstream at undergraduate level, collecting institutions of all kinds could be resourced to mobilise their collections in interdisciplinary teaching and learning of disciplines such as law, philosophy, classics or languages — a huge logistical and pedagogical task, even if they were well funded enough to do it. Examples such as the Andrew W. Mellon funded Ashmolean Museum Uni- versity Engagement Programme are helpful as models (Vitelli 2014).

Built Infrastructures and Processes

Objects do not move themselves, and it is rarely appropriate or safe for a group the size of a university class to be visiting a collection storage area. A number of university museums are planning or have launched spaces they are calling Object Laboratories — most notably the

Dr. Giovanna Vitelli (left), teaching object study and close reading as part of the

“Methodenwöche” of the Volkswagen Stiftung funded Doctoral Research Group

“Exhibiting Knowledge | Knowledge in Exhibitions: An Epistemic History of Exhibitions in the Second Half of the 20th Century”, University of Göttingen, April 2019. Photo: Martha Fleming.

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Kelvin Hall development of the Hunterian Museum of the University of Glasgow (2016) and the Forum Wissen project of the Zentrale Kustodie of the University of Göttingen, currently being built.⁹These built infrastructures are intended to enable close work in safe environments with collections and material culture, both for students and other researchers, and include every- thing from climate-controlled study carrels to analytical instrumentation for materials. They develop from the successes of collection study areas built into relatively open storage, such as the V&A Clothworker’s Centre for the Study and Conservation of Textiles and Fashion located at the large-scale depot of Blythe House in West London (The Clothworker’s Centre, opened 2013).

At their best, such Object Labs are designed based on meticulous needs analysis addressing the complex inter- actions they intend to support. What are the types of collections that will be deployed — materials, dimen- sions, climate requirements, security needs? What are the research questions that will be addressed — disciplinary and interdisciplinary, including scientific analysis and research on materials? What vehicles or equipment does the collections staff require for safe object movements

— what is the proximity to collections, handling equipment and quarantine areas? Space must be allocated for any training in object handling or instrument use that will be needed, and close access to documentation and catalogues of the collections, as well as relevant archival materials is a must. Processes, practices and logistics are also critical to the success of these physical spaces, and must be designed to facilitate access to collections, documentation, and expertise in ways that are well supported financially and make optimal use of people’s time — students, collections staff, and faculty members. Protocols are needed for study loans from other university departments and external collecting institutions. Students and other researchers require training to use any analytical equipment; this means the appointment of technical staff, equivalent to those employed in studios of art and design schools.

Studentships: Design and Funding

All this training for non-collection professionals working in the wider humanities research fields only makes sense in the framework of fully funded studentships and student-led research questions.¹⁰ The design of studentships is a complex process and involves in microcosm all the expenses and activities of any larger-scale research project. For collaborative doctoral studentships held across two very different institutions — universities and collecting institutions — greater challenges require more scaffolding but also deliver greater research rewards.

Ideally, such studentships would be co-designed, with the collecting institution, the prospective student and the university equally sharing the identification of collection materials, research questions and methodologies, deferring to each other’s strengths and knowledge bases in order to construct solid projects. Methodology choices should incorporate the valuable reflexive practice-based research methods deployed in collecting institutions as well as the conceptual and epistemic methods of the humanities and social sciences. It is best when studentships are held across departments at both the university and the collecting institution, such that the valuable interdisciplinarity of collections-based research can be fully realised and modelled — not an easy task, even for the experienced, and even in Denmark (Thinking Across Disciplines 2008; Fleming 2014).

Answering to two sets of research cultures for a doctoral student — both collecting institution and university department or discipline — ideally requires a four-year period of tenure for a collections-based PhD project. This is the trend in the UK and Germany, as it allows for full engagement across both the university and collecting institution, and can produce — without burnout — the most complete outcomes in the form of doctoral thesis depth, practice-based exhibitions, catalogues, knowledge transfer and alternative forms of publication. Two research cultures can also mean two locations. Student- ship financing should ideally include: research money for travel and accommodation between institutions (for supervisors as well as students), specialist training based

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on subject and collection materials, time-buyout for the collecting institution’s staff, and overhead costs to cover demands made on the collecting institution’s infrastructures (Hill and Meek 2019; Vestergaard Knudsen and Ekelund Simonsen 2017).

Larger cohorts or communities of practice with block grant funding for multiple (up to ten) studentships and a wide range of career levels and subject knowledge can create a strong interdisciplinary and inter-institutional working group with exponential growth in the quality and scale of knowledge exchange and production, similar to that found in more advanced research groups. Examples of such PhD training clusters include those offered by EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, European Training Networks and Innovative Training Networks, very few of which have yet addressed collections or trained for collections-based research.¹¹

Conclusion: Research and Teaching or the Teaching of Research?

Contemporary ideological challenges to the humanities to prove the value of their methods are accompanied by budget cuts that reduce their ability to respond coher- ently. In universities in the UK and increasingly across Europe, the deepening division between research and teaching occasioned by research metric evaluation is having a deleterious effect on teaching, one which excludes from scholarly discourse and evaluation such knowledge forms as exhibitions, artworks, and other activities. The “academicisation” effect of the Bologna process on research degrees in art schools, for example, which has over-ridden fledgling articulations of creative practice-based research with inappropriate standards, can be a useful lesson in the loss that occurs when under- recognised research practices are summarily devalued.

Practice-based research is also the modality through which most scholars working in collections are active in their fields: practicing in collection contexts. It makes intellectual sense that developments in humanities and social science research areas which are collections- related should be financed to be co-investigated and

co-taught with collecting institutions, including: post- colonial and decolonial collections theory, provenance projects of all kinds, material culture studies, archive and memory theory, critical heritage practice, the educational turn in creative practice, among others.

In Denmark, similarly to other European countries, collecting institutions must attain forms of university- defined research practice in order to be eligible for research funding from The Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces and the Danish Ministry of Culture.¹² This includes having at least a proportion of staff members with doctorates, and partnerships with universities that will oversee and vouch for the research “quality” of the application. It would be empowering and productive to have a commensurate and substantial investment of state funding to support these directives. In the first instance, state funding could fully support PhD study on the part of existing collecting institution staff itself inside practice-based frameworks that are appropriate for their research skills and research questions, including industry-related PhD awards for research undertaken in the course of their professional work and PhDs by “published work”, which would include previous exhibitions, catalogues, IT innovations, conservation projects, pedagogical innovation, etc.

In terms of wider European policy and funding, it is crucial that the specificity of collections-based research and museum, archive and library practice be articu- lated as a well-structured set of methodologies that also demonstrate collections to be an arena for developing and consolidating essential interdisciplinary methods.

This means the financing, recognition and operationalisation of the collecting institution itself as a critically significant agent in knowledge economies. Best practice advice at policy level, such as the International Council of Museums, the International Association of Universities and subject specialist training champions, would build a community of practice with appropriate profile. As in other recognised research fields, there could be reward systems and appropriate evaluation for collections-based research and the collecting institution practice-based

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research that underpins it. The creation of a perma- nent research institute composed equally of university academics and collections-based scholars, including professional staff, and with regular conferences and international workshops on collections-based methods, pedagogy, and emergent research themes would embed these methods. A scholarly journal focused on the inter- face between practice and theory in collections-based research with a widely diverse editorial board and peer review college could consolidate them. Strengthening the case for collecting institution work as practice-based research is the only way to support a long-term development of deeply rooted and effective partnership practices and protocols between universities and collecting institutions — for research, for teaching and for learning.

The author would like to thank colleagues internationally for their collaboration over many years in this field, and Danish colleagues in universities, museums, libraries and other institutions who shared their experiences with her confidentially.

NOTER

1 It is critically important to remember that knowledge practices in many of these varied disciplines all demon- strably originate in historical collecting practices, including attendant collections information and compara- tive relational analysis. These collections still exist in the form of ethnography, natural history, art and archaeology museums, however much the intellectual disciplines that they spawned may have floated free of their beginnings.

2 The OECD Frascati Manual definition of research indicates that collecting-institution practice sits well within its outline: “Research and experimental development (R&D) comprise creative and systematic work undertaken in order to increase the stock of knowledge – including knowledge of humankind, culture and society – and to devise new applications of available knowledge.” See “OECD Frascati Manual 2015”.

3 In Denmark, the largest cohorts of doctoral students to be given some form of collections access recently has, however, been squarely in a museum studies context focused mainly on interpretation (formidling), experience economy, digitisation and social media. Professor Kirsten Drotner (Syddansk Universitet) has led several consecutive

doctoral studentship block grant partnerships of this kind across a range of universities and museums. See “DREAM, 2009-2015” and “Vores Museum, 2016-2020”.

4 In the UK, the Arts and Humanities Research Council- funded Collaborative Doctoral Award has continued to be a significant pathway through postgraduate humanities study in the UK. In nearly 15 years, around 1,000 studentships have been awarded. Co-supervised one-to-one by archive, museum and library professionals, they also involve training both at the individual collecting institution and through a non-university consortium. See “Collabora- tive Doctoral Training Partnership Consortium, n.d.”.

5 Practice-based doctorates in the creative arts suffer some of the same problems. In Denmark, doctoral students at the Royal Danish Art Academy are still required to register with a University and to complete a written dissertation on top of their creative productions. Re-orientating towards the actual methods and outcomes is advised by the SHARE working group. See Step-Change for Higher Arts Research and Education 2013, by the SHARE working group.

6 See the report by Hill and Meek 2019, which contains a measured overview of the challenges experienced by students, universities and collecting institutions in the framework of these doctoral studentships. In their overview of recent Danish experiences, Vestergaard Knudsen and Ekelund Simonsen corroborate similar problems, p. 103: “a research program that contained both cross- institutional partnerships and research education posed certain challenges when attaining anchorage in terms of form, content, and time.”

7 This research methodology originates in technical art history, such as that practiced in the Center for Art Technological Studies and Conservation (CATS) based at the National Gallery of Denmark since 2013. Such methods now extend out to other research fields, including history of science, and involve humanities researchers in making. For example, The Making and Knowing Project: Intersections of Craft Making and Scientific Knowing, see “The Making and Knowing Project 2014-2020” and ARTECHNE: Technique in the Arts, 1500-1950: Concept, Practices, Expertise, see

“ARTECHNE 2015-2020”.

8 Such training could best be integrated into the statutory basic research training that is offered through Graduate Schools. This is now the case for the Collections-Based Research Programme at the University of Reading, where I was Programme Director: “Two-week Intensive Training Programme 2015-2016”. See “Centre for Collections Based Research, founded 2013”. There is now a modular training version given through the University of Reading Graduate School. See “Reading Researcher Development Programme, 2018-2019”, pp. 19-22.

9 The Hunterian Collections Study Centre, Kelvin Hall, University of Glasgow: “The Collections Study Centre

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operates as an Object Laboratory, in which museum collections and objects are selected and delivered into purpose-designed teaching and study spaces according to academic, educational or curatorial training purposes.” See

“The Hunterian Collections Study Centre, 2016”. Object Laboratory, Forum Wissen, Zentrale Kustodie, University of Göttingen: The Göttingen Object Laboratory will be embedded in a new building that will showcase the signifi- cance of objects, instruments and collecting practices in the production of knowledge since the Enlightenment.

See “Forum Wissen, n.d.”

10 In Denmark, a modest number of such doctoral studentships are funded regularly in art history by the New Carlsberg Foundation and the Novo Nordisk Foundation among others. In the wider humanities, the Danish Kulturministeriets Forskningspulje is a source of financial support for co-structured doctoral studentships across collecting institutions and universities: recent examples include Trolddomsprocessernes ophør: Dekonstruktion af trolddom 1660-1730, a collaboration between the Institut for Historie, SDU, and Sydvestjyske Museer, as well as support for Archaeology, ancient DNA, and textile research, which spanned the Center for Textile Research, the Nationalmuseet, Statens Naturhistoriske Museum, and the Center for Textile Research at the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

11 EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) include Innovative Training Networks with doctoral studentships. ITNs support competitively selected joint research training and/or doctoral programmes imple- mented by European partnerships of universities, research institutions and so-called “non-academic organisations”.

“The research training programmes provide experience outside academia, hence developing innovation and employability skills. ITNs include industrial doctorates, in which non-academic organisations have an equal role to universities in respect of the researcher’s time and supervision, and joint doctoral degrees delivered by several universities.” See “Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions 2019”.

12 See “Slots- og Kulturstyrelsen 2016”. These guidelines are intended to be read in relation to the Danish Museum Act. (Museumsloven, jf. lovbekendtgørelse nr. 1505 af 14.

december 2006 om museer mv.,) but are not themselves binding. Note: “The vast majority of the requirements in the Act are formulated to allow for unambiguous assessment of their fulfilment. However, some requirements in the Danish Museum Act are formulated such that assessment of their fulfilment requires a clarification or definition of a level at which the task is performed (e.g.

the provision that “the museum must have a reasonable academic standard”). This clarification is provided by the recommendations of the Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces, which in such cases are a reflection of the desired level.” (p. 4). This interpretative “flexibility” can work both for and against collecting institutions.

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